I heart burgerville

Just when I thought my love for Burgerville couldn't grow any more, I get proved wrong. Given the wonderfully sunny and crisp, but not cold, fall weather we are having, I decided to walk to Burgerville for lunch. As I ordered all my food that was pretty much all locally grown or made in the NW, the cashier asked that I NOT throw my garbage away after I ate. Before I could ask why, she informs me that the company has made the decision to compost and recycle! How very NW and cool is that?!?!?!?! In their research, Burgerville hopes to reduce their garbage sent to landfills will be reduced 85% from 340 tons a month to a mere 41 tons! See the article below for details. (sorry for the need to likely copy and paste on the link. I am at work and not really wanting to take the time to figure out why the link isn't working right now...)

http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-21/1192580268282530.xml&storylist=orlocal

Autumn is the time to leap, not Fall

So this autumn I am doing something I have never done before. I'm super excited as it is turning out to be a great outlet for my creativity. Here it goes: I am making a movie. Well, a short film really. Some of you readers have graciously opened your homes up to the altar of possible locations and for that I am truly grateful. My friend and partner in the venture has been assigning me various books to beef up my film making knowledge. Some of it seems very intuitive and some just downright weird given the various union and guild regulations, etc. But I am up for the challenge. I like challenges.

At present this is more of a side hobby, but who knows, it may turn into something else. But I realized something about myself when this opportunity popped up. I often get that inspiration to leap into the abyss of the unknown, but my fear of success and failure (that somehow manage to coexist at the same time) eventually pulls me back. The times that I follow through on that intuition usually provide some of my happiest memories so why do I hold myself back? Well, I am done with that poppycock nonsense!

I'm hitting the road...well the airways

Heading off to San Francisco Friday morning for a short trip to San Francisco with JD. Should be fun. Helps that I am just now dipping into my 2007 vacation. All the vacation I have taken was using up 2006 days. Amazing how much vacation I store up when I don't get my old 4 weeks (my current company only gives me 3) and I don't head off to Europe due to my desire to save some money. Anyway, should be good times ahead.

This morning I am bugged!

So I got up a bit early this morning since I knew I would be in meetings most of the day and I wanted to have time for something productive. I guess it is a good thing I did get up early; had I not, I wouldn't have found an ENORMOUS bug in my apartment. I do take offense to HOW the thing was discovered. I came upon it (or more accurately it came upon me) when it fell from my bathroom light fixture on my leg, while I was sitting on the toilet. I don't handle bugs of any size well, but a giant something with long antennas that make its size go from its body length of an inch+ to nearly 2 inches is more than my bleary eyes can take; especially when the thing lands on me so unceremoniously. Ugh. I would give you a more accurate size measurement, but the bug is currently residing under a opaque mug on my living room floor. I know I should kill it. I know I want to kill it. Yet I cannot kill it. The bigger the creature, the harder it is for me to kill. Especiially if they have any type of hard skeletal body. Just he crunching sound of the thing being crushed grosses me out. So I will call my trusty friend in the neighborhood who will happily come and dispose of the creature for me.

ps. I just learned (as I thought it might be) that the bug is a giant, grown silver fish. I was going to put a picture of one up, but frankly I couldn't really look at my screen and had to blindly close the window. So count yourself lucky.

Lufthansa is the distracting demon

Because I love to travel, I get emails from different airlines and travel sites. Lufthansa has a sweepstakes going on right now that has a game attached...a highly addictive game.

The gist? There are 3 rounds.
Round 1 has a map of Europe (no words) and red dots for each city they fly into. They will list a city, you click the corresponding red dot. Easy enough (well, unless, like me, you never learned German geography.) Each of the 5 answers has a maximum of 1000 points. The points will be adjusted downward for how far from the correct answer you are.

Round 2 is the same thing, but they have removed the red dots and you only have the country outlines to go from. The 5 questions are each worth 2,000 points.

Round 3 is more difficult as they remove the country outlines and you are left with the land mass outline. The 5 questions are each worth 3,000 points.

Total points possible: 30,000. Number of people who have achieved it? A lot. Me? Not so much, but I have gotten pretty close. I won't say how many times it has taken to get this score, mostly because I don't think I can count that high. Anyway, see for yourself.

Can you spot the fake smile?

I apparently can. I found this on my perusing of the internet while at home. Amazingly not while working! I got 19 of 20 correct and could kick myself because the one I missed, I almost chose differently. But it is apparently a study done by the BBC in the UK.

Sorry, I can't be bothered right now to make sure the link is working, so if not, just copy and paste.

Can you spot the fake smile? http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/

the spoken word vs. the written word?

Do you think we as people have our most intellectual of discussions with the written conversation or the spoken dialogue? How do we encapsulate those things discovered in the spoken dialogue so that we can refer back to it and allow it to grow within us and possibly change our own perceptions of ourselves?

I just recently came across a response to a friends email that I had saved on my computer for some reason. The bulk of our emailing was done on a website that deletes messages after 30 days whether you want them to or not. Needless to say, I forgot about this until I decided I wanted to print out the conversations and couldn't find them. But discovering this response on my computer made me realize how often I forget that I can and do have intellectual discussions. I also forget how much I thoroughly enjoy them. Spoken converations probably happen often as well, but I have a short memory when it comes to this stuff and so do need the reminders of those things written down. But what about other people?

The Secret is out but I wish it wasn't

This post is really my venting of how much The Secret bugs me. I can appreciate and recognize that like attracts like and that if you send out positive energy, it is a good thing and that usually that is what you get back. But it seems like since Oprah championed the whole concept and the craze, tons of people credit it for their success...and it is getting ridiculous.

When people say that they won a contest because they believe in the Secret and they practiced the principles of it, I just want to scream. If you go with that thinking, then clearly the other contestants weren't really believing in the Secret or else they weren't believing in it as much. Aargh.

If you want to believe in the concept, fine. But at least recognize that the belief should be more that if you want good things in your life you should project good things. You don't get to always pick what those good things are. God does. You just need to be open to the possibility.

Okay. That is it. It is out of my system.

What accent do you have?

So Aisy http://aisyworld.blogspot.com/ had this test on her blog and I decided to copy her. Apparently I don't sound like the area I come from and have lived most of my life in. Maybe its because I had speech therapy for 10 years...hmmm, maybe my therapist was from the "midlands". However, I wonder when they say the region of "the West" if they mean California. But I buy into the fact that it is an accent that "doesn't have an accent". I mean, people on the news and radio all learn to talk like us so they can sound good!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
The South
The Inland North
Philadelphia
Boston
The Northeast
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Let's try this again

I finally decided to try and correct my map of countries travelled. We'll see if it takes this time...



create your own visited country map